Weekend tech reading: What's a fair penalty for piracy?

What is a fair penalty for illegal file-sharing or piracy? This week a federal jury handed down the verdict in the third file-sharing trial against a Minnesota mother of four who has been fighting against the charges brought by the RIAA since 2005. The jury found Jamie Thomas-Rasset guilty of pirating 24 copyrighted songs from six different record labels and awarded the plaintiffs $1.5 million in damages, or an astounding $62,500 per song. Myce

AT&T Supreme Court case could cripple your legal rights For years Judges have been telling ISPs (both wireless and terrestrial) that they can't ban a customer from joining a class action lawsuit by using fine print in user contracts. AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Comcast have all tried (and failed, in the eyes of the law) to instead force users to accept binding arbitration, a system of complaint resolution companies prefer because the firms they hire to do this service rule in the corporations' favor 95% of the time or more. Now AT&T's taking the issue to the Supreme Court. DSLReports

Lifting of blogger's story triggers online furor A magazine accused of publishing a blogger's story without permission has seen a dramatic rise in the number of its Facebook friends, although they're not all that friendly. The tale of writer Monica Gaudio hit the Web on Wednesday after she reported that her story, "A Tale of Two Tarts," was apparently lifted and published by the print magazine Cooks Source with her byline, but without her knowledge or any compensation. CNET

Apple dead pixel policy: one for iPhone, three for iPad There are few things more annoying than opening up your shiny new electronic toy only to find one or more misbehaving pixels. While dead or stuck pixels are less of a problem than they were a few years ago, it does still happen. Manufacturers and retailers rarely go public with what their warranty policies are on these display anomalies, preferring instead to deal with issues on a case-by-case basis. TAUW

The cloud fiasco of 2010: Drop.io This is nothing new to me. A company shows up with a good idea. It encourages people to use its services. The service is good, and the company says it has premium services, which are even better, but you have to pay a little money. You pay, and you begin to rely on the service even more. Then the company sells itself to some other company that closes the service down, leaving you hanging. Welcome to Drop.io. PCMag

Trend Micro cries "antitrust" over Microsoft Security Essentials In recent months, Microsoft has made a couple of moves to make its Microsoft Security Essentials antivirus software more widely used. First, the company relaxed licensing restrictions, making it permissible to use MSE in businesses with ten or fewer PCs; prior to this change, the software was only licensed for home users. Ars Technica